The Last Kiss
by Sharkie2008
Summary: Everything is right in the Cohen's lives. When an unsuspecting shot is fired and Seth is the prime suspect.
1. Chapter 1

Seth and Summer are 17 and in this story, I kinda mix some stuff up. They've been best friends forever, and Seth has a blood brother Ryan. Summer is an only child. Please read and review. I'm kinda just playing around with this, and it's a story about Seth and Summer, but mostly in their parents views. 

Although a reservation had never been made, the table in the way back of the Happy Chinese, it was always reserved. Every friday night, the Cohens and the Roberts met there sharing their stories of the week and catching up with their best friends. At first, they'd tried bringing in the endless amounts of diapers and car seats. Their extra luggage they carried everywhere caused an upbrining for the waiters that eventually they had to quit bringing their kids before a steaming plate of fried rice went all over an unsuspecting coustomer.

Sandy Cohen was surprised when he found himself the first person to dinner that Friday night. He waved at all the familiar waiters, and hostess then took his seat in his 'assigned' chair. He had finished a case surprisingly early at the office and was able to be here on time. He picked up his chopsticks and slid them out of their packet playing around with them. He had been coming here ever since he could remember and he still couldn't figure out to hold the damn things.

'Hi' Maya Roberts said, suddenly across from him. 'I guess i'm early"

"No," Sandy pointed out. 'Everyone else is late'

'Really?' She asked shrugged her coat off and hanging it off the back of her chair. 'Iv'e never been early, I was hoping I was' Sandy gave her a compassionate smile.

They were connected by the one thing they had in common-Kirsten Cohen, who had not arrived yet. So they sat there in an uncomfortable silence, knowing things about each other neither had any idea. Sandy twirlied the chopsticks around his fingers with ease. 'What do you think?' He asked Maya. 'Should I give it all up, become a drummer'

'I wouldn't do that just yet,' She said. 'You'd have to grow your hair out and get a nipple ring or something like that'

'Do I want to know why you're talking about nipple rings?' Neil Roberts said placing his hand on his wife's shoulder which passed for an embrace after so many years of marriage.

'Sandy wants to give it all up, and become one,' Maya said smiling at Sandy while she scooted into the booth so her husband had a place to sit down.

'Oh I don't think Kir would like that,' He said picking his napkin up and sliding it into his lap. 'Speaking of which, where is she?'

'Late,' Sandy said checking his watch.

'Thank you captain obvious,' Neil said, smiling.

'Did you order yet?' Maya asked.

'Kirsten orders,' He used as an excuse. Truthfully, he had no idea what anyone got. Kirsten was usually the first one at the table every week, and kept the meal running smoothly.

As if Sandy had invoked her, Kirsten came running through the door of the Chinese restuarant. 'I'm late, I know,' She said unbottoning her coat with one hand. 'You'll never believe the day I had,' The other three at the table leaned forward expecting to her one of Kirsten Cohen's infamous stories, instead she waved over the waiter. 'The usual,' she said, sliding into the booth next to Sandy.

The usual? Sandy, Neil, and Maya all looked at each other. Was it really that easy?

'So,' Kirsten began, taking a hair tie off her wrist wrapping her hair into a low pony tail. 'First, I spend the morning at the Motor Vehicles Divison, which is awful under the best of circumstances. So I'm the next one in line- you know, just in front of that little window- and the clerk, swear to God, has a heart attack. Just dies on the floor'

'That is awful,' Maya breathed.

'Mmm. Especially because they closed the line down, so I had to start from scratch'

'More billable hours,' Neil said.

'No, not in this case,' Kirsten said. 'I'd already scheduled a two o'clock appointment at Exeter'

'That school?'

'Yeah. With a Mr. J. Foxhill. He turned out to be a third-former with a lot of extra cash who needed someone to sit in detention for him by proxy,'

Sandy laughed. 'That's ingenuity,'

'Needless to say, it wasn't acceptable to the headmaster, who wasted my time with a lecture about adult responsibility even after I told him I didn't know any more about the plan than he had. And then, when I go to pick up Ryan from soccer, the car gets a flat, and by the time I change the spare and get to the playing field he's already found a ride home,'

'Kir,' Maya said. 'What happened to the clerk?'

'You changed a tire?' Sandy asked, as if Maya hadn't spoken. 'I'm impressed,'

'So was I. But just in case it's on backwards I want to take your car downtown tonight,'

'You're working again?'

Kirsten nodded, smiling as the waiter delivered their food. 'I'm headed to the box office for Metallica tickets,'

'What happened to the clerk?' Maya said more forefully.

They all stared at her. 'Jeez Maya,' Kirsten said. 'You don't have yell,' Maya flushed and Kirsten immeadiatley genteled her voice. 'I don't know what happened, actually,' She admitted. 'He went off in some ambulance. By the way, I saw Summers painting today in the State building,'

'What were you doing at the State building?' Sandy asked.

She shrugged. 'Looking for Sum's painting,' She said. 'It seems so...well, professional, with that gilded frame and the big blue ribbon hanging underneath it. And you all made fun of me when I saved the crayon pictures she used to make with Seth over at our house,'

Neil smiled. 'We laughed because you said they were going to be your retirement income one day,'

'You'll see,' Kirsten said. 'A statewide art champion at seventeen; a gallery opening at twenty-one...she'll be hanging in the Museum of Modern Art before she's thirty.' She reached for Sandy's arm, and twisted the face of his wristwatch towards her. 'I've got five more minutes,'

Sandy let his hand fall back into his lap. 'The Ticketmaster's open at seven at night?'

'Seven A.M' Kirsten said. 'Sleeping bag's in the car,' She yawned. 'I'm thinking I need a career change. Some position with a little less stress...like an air traffic controller or the prime minister of Isreal.' She reached for a platter of mu shi chicken, began rolling the pancakes and passing them out. 'How is your case against Greenblatt's?'

'Good,' Sandy said. 'We solved today with just a few fits from them snoopy little newpsies,'

'Good,' Kirsten said. 'Well, That was a sumptuous and relaxing dinner'

'You can't go yet,' Maya said, turning to ask a busboy for fortune cookies. When the man returned, she stuffed a few in Kirsten's pockets. 'Here. The box office doesn't offer take-out,'

Neil picked up a cookie and cracked it. '"A gift of love is not one to be taken lightly,"' he read aloud.

'"You are as young as you feel"' Sandy said, scanning his own fortune. 'Doesn't say much for me right now.'

Everyone looked at Maya, but she read the thin strip and pocketed it. She believed that if you spoke it alound, your good fortune had no chance of coming true.

Kirsten took one of the remaining cookies from the plate and cracked it open. 'Imagine that,' she said, laughing. 'I got a dud,'

'It's missing?' Neil said. 'That ought to be worth a free meal,'

'Check the floor, Kir. You must have dropped it. Who ever head of a fortune cookie without a fortune?' Maya said.

But it was not on the floor, or beneath a plate, or caught in the folds of Kirsten's coat. She shook her head ruefully and lifted her teacup. 'Here's to my future,' she said. She drained the tea, and then, in a hurry, she left.

They hugged.  
And for that moment, it felt like everything was okay. He covered her body with his, and as she put her arms around him she could picture him in all his incarnations. The moon rolled, sloe-eyed in the night sky; and she breathed in the scent of his skin. 'I love you, Cohen' She said.  
He kissed her so gently she wondered if she had imagined it. She pulled back slightly, to look in his eyes.  
And then there was a shot.


	2. Chapter 2

**Thank you to everyone who reviewed my last chapter. This is the second chapter and I hope you all enjoy it. Remember to review!**

CHAPTER 2

When the phone rang at three in the morning, Sandy Cohen was instantly awake. He tried to imagine what could have possibly gone wrong in the Greenblatt's case. He groped across the bed, where his wife should have been, answering the phone. 'Yes?'

'Is this Sandy said. this is Officer Stanley of the Newport police. Your son has been injured, and he's being taken to HOAG.'

Sandy felt his throat working up sentences that tangled around each other. 'Is he...was there a car accident?'

There was a brief pause. 'No, sir,' the officer said.

Sandy's heart twisted. 'Thank you,' he said, hanging up, although he did not know why he was thinking someone who had brought him such horrible news. The moment the reviever was back in place, he had a thousand questions to ask. Where was Seth hurt? Critically or superficially? Was Summer still with him? What had happened? Sandy dressed in the clothes he'd already thrown into the hamper and made his way downstairs in a matter of minutes. The hospial, he knew, would take him seventeen minutes to reach. He was already speeding down the road when he picked up the car phone and dialed Kirsten.  
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'What did they say?' Maya asked for the tenth time. 'What did they say exactly?'

Neil buttoned the fly of his jeans and stuffed his feet into tennis shoes. He remembered, too late, that he didn't have socks on. Fuck the socks.

'Neil.'

He glanced up. 'That Sum was injured, and that she'd been taken to the hospital.' His hands were shaking, yet he was amazed to find himself able to do what was necessary: push Maya towards the door, find his car keys, plot the fasest route to HOAG.'

He had hypothetically wondered, what would happen if a phone call came in the middle of the night, a phone call that had the power to render one speechless and disbelieving. He had expected deep down that he'd be a basket case. And yet here he was, backing carefully out of his driveway, holding up well, the only sign betraying panic a tiny tic in his cheek.

'Sweetheart," Neil said, noticing the worry on his wife's face. 'We don't know anything yet.' But as he drove pas the Cohen's house he took in the absolute quiet of the scene, the peaceable lack of light in the windows, and he could not help feeling a stab of jealosy at the normality of it all. _Why us?_ he thought, and did not notice the brake lights of a car at the end of the road, already turning toward town.  
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Kirsten lay on the sidewalk between a trio of teenagers with spiked green hair and a couple that was coming as close to sex as possible in a public venue. If Seth ever does that to his hair, she though, we would...Would what? It had never been an issue because, for as long as Kirsten could remember, Seth had had the same jew-fro as he would call it hairstyle. And as for Romeo and Juliet here, on her right-well, that was a no-brainer also. As ssoon as it had begun to matter, Seth and Summer had started dating, which is what everyone had been rooting for in the first place.

Four and a half hours from now, her client's sons would have prime seats at a metallica concert. She'd go home and sleep. By the time she got back there, Sandy would have returned from surfing, Ryan would be gearing up for a soccer game, and Seth might just be rollng out of bed. Then Kirsten would do what she did every other Saturday that she didn't have plans or an invasion of relatives: She'd go to Maya's, or have Maya come over, and they'd talk about work and teenagers, and husbands. She had several good female friends, but Maya was the only one for whom the house didn't have to be cleaned, for whom she didn't have to wear her makeup, and around whom she could say anything without fear of repercussions, or of looking truly stupid.

'Lady,' one of the green-haired kids said. 'You got a smoke?'

It came out in a rush, yagottasmoke, so that as first Kirsten was stunned at the audacity of the statement. No, she wanted to say, I do not gotta, and you shouldn't either. Then she realized he was wagging a cigarette- at least she hoped it was a cigaette-in front of her face. 'Sorry,' She said, shaking her head.

It was impossible to believe that teenagers such as this existed, not when she had ones like Seth and Ryan, who seemed another breed entirely. Perhaps these children, with their stegosaurus hair and leather vests, only happened to look this way on the off hours, transforming themselves into scrubbed, well mannered adolescents during the time they spent with their parents. Ridiculous, she told herself. Even the thought of Seth and Ryan having an alter ego was out of the question. You couldn't give birth to someone and not sense that something so dramatic was going on.

She felt a humming agaisnt her hip and shifted, that the amorous couple had gotten a little too close. But the buzzing didn't stop, and when she reached down to find the source she remembered her beeper, which she'd carried in her purse ever since she'd started up Other People's Time. It was Sandy who insisted; what if he had to go back to the office and one of the kids needed something?

Of course, in the way that most preventative medicines work, just having the beeped had managed to ward off emergencies. It had only beeped twice in five years: once, when Ryan called to ask where she kept the rug-cleaning supplies, and once when the batteries were low. She fished it out of the bottomg of her purse and pushed the button that identified the caller. Her car phone. But who would be in her car at this time of night?

Sandy had driven it home from the restaurant. After crawling out of her sleeping bag, Kirsten walked across the street to the nearest phone booth, graffitied with sausagelike initials. As soon as Sandy picked up, she heard the hum of the road beneath the tires.

'Kirsten,' Sandy said, his voice catching. 'You've got to come,'

And a moment later, leaving her sleeping bag behind, she started to run.  
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They wouldn't take the lights out of his eyes. The fixtures hung over him, bright silver saucers that made him wince. He felt at least three people touching him-laying hands, shouting directions, cutting off his clothes. He could not move his arms or legs, and when he tried, he felt straps lacing across them, a collar anchoring his head.

'BP's falling,' said the woman. 'It's only seventy over palp.'

'Pupils dilated but unresponsive. Seth? Seth? Can you hear me?'

'He's tachycardic. Get me two large-bore IV's, either fourteen or sixteen gauge, stat. Give him D-5 normal saline, wide open for a liter to start with, please. And I want to draw some bloods...get a CBC with diff, platelets, coags, chem-20, UA, tox screen, and send a type and screen to the blood bank.'

Then there was a stabbing pain in the crook of his arm and the sharp sound of ripping adhesive tape. 'What have we got?' asked a new voice, and the woman spoke again. 'A holy mess,' she said. Seth felt a sharp prick near his forehead, which had him arcing agaisnt his restraints and floating back to the soft, warm hands of a nurse. 'It's okay, Seth,' she soothed. How did they know his name?

'There's some visible cranium. Call radiology, we need them to clear the C-spine.'

There was a scurry of noise, of yelling. Seth slid his eyes to the slit in the curtain off to his right and saw his father. This was the hospital. He was standing with Summer's parents, trying to get past a bunch of nurses who wouldn't let him by,

Seth flailed so suddenly he managed to rip the IV out of his arm. He looked directly at Neil Robert's and screamed, but there was no sound, no noise, just wave after wave of fear.  
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'I don't give a fuck about procedure,' Sandy Cohen said, and then there was a crash of instruments and a scuffle of footsteps that diverted the attention of the nurses enough to let him duck behind the stained curtain. His son was fighting backboard restraints and a Philadelphia collar. There was blood everywhere, all over his face and shirt and neck. 'I'm Sandy Cohen' he said to the ER physician who was barreling towards them. He reached out and firmly grasped Seth's hand. 'What's going on?'

'EMT's brought him in with a girl,' the doctor said quietly. 'From what we can see, he's got a scalp laceration. We were about to send him to radiology to check skull cervical ceterbral fractures, and if they report back negative, we'll get him down to CT scan.'

Sandy felt Seth squeeze his hand so tightly his wedding band dug into the skin. Surely, he though, he's all right if he has this strength. 'Summer,' Seth whispered hoarsely. 'Where'd they take Sum?'

'Sandy?' a tentative voice asked. He turned around to see Maya and Neil hovering at the edge of the curtain, horrified, no doubt, by all that blood. God only knew how they'd gotten pas the dragons at triage. 'Is Seth all right?'

'He's fine,' Sandy said, more for himself than for anyone else in the room. 'He's going to be just fine.'

A resident hung up a telephone reciever. 'Radiology's waiting,' she said. The ER doctor nodded towards Sandy. 'You can go with him,' he said. 'Keep him calm.'

Sandy walked beside the gurney, but he did not let go of his son's hand. He began trotting as the ER staff wheeled it more quickly past the Roberts'. 'How's Summer?' he remembered to ask, and disappeared before they could answer.

The doctor who'd been attending Seth turned around. 'You're Mr. and Mrs. Roberts?' he asked.

The came forward simultaneously.

'Can you step outside with me?'  
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The doctor led them to a small alcove behind the coffee machines, decorated with nubby blue couches and ugly Formica end tabels, and Maya immeadiatly relaxed. If they weren't being led to an examination room on the double, the danger must have passed. Maybe Summer was already up on a patient ward, or off to radiology as Seth was. Maybe she was being brought out to meet them.

'Please,' the doctor said. 'Sit down.'

Maya had every intention of standing, but her knees gave out from beneath her. Neil remained upright, frozen.

'I'm very sorry,' the doctor began, the only words that Maya could not rework into anything but what they signified. She crumpled further, her body folding into itself, until her head was so deeply buring beneath her shaking arms that she could not hear what the man was saying.

'Your daugheter was pronounced dead on arrival. There was a gunshot wound to the head. It was instantaneous; she didn't suffer.' He paused. 'I'm going to need one of you to identify the body.'

Neil tried to remember to blink his eyes. Before, it had always been an involuntary act, but right now everything-breathing, standing, being-was stricly tied to his own self-control. 'I don't understand,' he said, in a voice too high to be his own. 'She was with Seth Cohen.'

'Yes,' the doctor said. 'They were brought in together.'

'I don't understand,' Neil repeated, when what he really meant was _How can she be dead if he's alive?_

'Who did it?' Maya forced out, her teeth clenched around the question as if it were a bone she had to keep possession of. 'Who shot her?'

The doctor shoot his head. 'I don't know, Mrs. Roberts. I'm sure the police who were at the scene will be here to talk to you shortly.'

Police?

'Are you ready to go?'

Neil stared at the doctor, wondering why on earth this man thought he ought to be leaving. Then he remembered. Summer. Her body.

He followed the doctor back into the ER. Was it his imagination or did the nurses look at him differently now? He passed cubicles with moaning, damaged, living people and finally stopped in front of a curtain with no noise, no bustle, no activity behind it. The doctor waitied until Neil inclined his head, then drew back the blind.

Summer was lying on her back on a table. Neil took a step forward, resting his hand on her hair. Her forehead was smooth, still warm. The doctor was wrong; that was all. She was not dead, she could not be dead, she...He shifted his hand, and her head lolled toward him, allowing him to see the hole above her right ear, the size of a silver dollar, ragged on the edges and mattered with dried blood. But no new blood was trickling.

'Mr.Roberts?' the doctor said.

Neil nodded and ran out of the examination room. He ran past the man on the stretched cluthching his heart, four times older than Summer would even be. He ran pas the resident carrying a cup of coffee. He ran pas Kirsten Cohen, breathless and reaching for him. He picked up speed. Then he turned the corner, sank to his knees, and retched.


	3. Chapter 3

**So I know this chapter is extremly short. But bare with it! You'll understand why it's so short at the end, and the next chapter!

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CHAPTER 3

Kirsten had run the whole way to HOAG clutching hope to her chest, a package that grew heavier and more unwieldy with every step. But Sandy was not in the ER waiting room, and all of her wishes for a manageable injury- a broke arm or a light concussion- had vanished when she'd stumbled upon Neil in the triage are. "Look again," she demanded of the triage nurse.  
"Seth Cohen."

The nurse nodded. "He was in here a while ago," she said. "I just don't know where they've taken him." She glanced up sympathetically. "Why don't I see if anyone else knows something?"

"Yes," Kirsten said as imperiously as she could, wilting as soon as the nurse turned her back.

She let her eyes roam over the serviceable Emergency entranceway, from the empty wheelchairs waiting like wallflowers at a dane to the television shackled to the ceiling. At the edge of the area, Kirsten saw a swatch of red fabric. She moved toward it, recognizing the scarlet overcoat she and Maya had found for eighty percent off at Filene's.

"Maya?" Kirsten whispered. Maya lifted her head, her face just as stricken as Neil's had been. "Is Summer hurt too?"

Maya stared at her for a long moment. "No," she said carefully. "Summer is not hurt."

"Oh, thank God-"

"Sum," Maya interrupted. "is dead"  
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"What's taking so long?" Kirsten asked for the third time, pacing in front of the tiny window in the private room that had been assigned to Seth. "If he's really all right, they how come they haven't brought him back yet?"

Sandy sat in the only chair, his head in his hands. He himself had seen the CT scans, and he'd never looked over one with such fear of finding an intracranial contusion or an epidural hemorrhage. But Seth's brain was intact; his wounds superficial.  
They had taken him back to the ER to be stitched up by a surgeon; he would be montored overnight and then sent for additional tests the next day.

"Did he say enything to you? About what happened?"

Sandy shook his head. "He was scared, Kirsten. I wasn't going to push him." He stood up and leaned agaisnt the doorframe. "He asked where they'd brought Summer."

Kirsten turned slowly. "You didn't tell him," She said.

"No." Sandy swallowed thickly. "At the time I didn't even think about it. About them being together when this happened."

Kirsten crossed the room and slipped her arms around Sandy. Even now, he stiffened; he had not been brought up to embrace in public places, and brushes with death did not alter the rules. "I don't want to think about it," she murmured, laying her cheek agaisnt his back. "I saw Maya, and I keep imagining how easily that could have been me."

Sandy pushed her away and walked toward the radiator, belching out its heat. "What the hell were they thinking, driving through a bad neighborhood?"

"What neighborhood?" Kirsten said, seizing on the new detail. "Where did the ambulance come in from?"

Sandy turned to her. "I don't know," he said. "I just assumed."

Suddenly she was a woman with a mission. "I could go back down to Emergency while we're waiting," Kirsten said. "They have to have that sort of information logged." She strode purposefully toward the door, but as she went to pull it, it was opened from the outside. A male orderly wheeled in Seth, his head swathed in thick white bandages.

She was rooted to the floor, unable to connect this sunken boy with the strong son who had towered over her just that morning.  
The nurse explained something that Kirsten didn't bother to listen to, and then she and the orderly left the room.

Kirsten heard her own breathing providing a back beat for thin drip, drip of Seth's IV. His eyes were glassy with sedatives,  
unfocused with fear. Kirsten sat down on the edge of the bed and cradled him in her arms. "Ssh," she said, as he started to cry against the front of her sweater, first thin tears and then loud, unstoppable sobs. "It's all right."

Within minutes Seth's hiccups leveld, and his eyes closed. Kirsten tried to hold him to her, even after his big hody went slack in her arms. She glanced at Sandy, who was sitting in the chair beside the hospital bed like a stiff and stoic sentry.  
He wanted to cry, but he wouldn't. Sandy hadn't cried since he'd been seven.

Kirsten did not like to cry around him, either. It was not that he ever told her she shouldn't, but the plain face that now he wasn't as visibly upset as she was made her feel foolish rather than sensitive. She bit her lip and pulled open the door of the room, wanting to have her breakdown in private. In the hallway, she flattened her palms agaisnt the cool cinder block wall and tried to think of just yesterday, when she had gone grocery shopping and had cleaned the downstairs bathroom and had yelled at Seth for leaving the milk out on the kitchen counter all day so it spoiled. Yesterday, when everything had made sense.

"Excuse me."

Kirsten turned her head to see a tall, dark-haired woman. "I'm Detective-Sergeant Marrone of the Newport police. Would you be Mrs. Cohen?"

She nodded and shook the policewoman's hand. "Were you the one who found them?"

"No, I wasn't. But I was called in to the scene. I need to ask you some questions."

"Oh," Kirsten said, surprised. "I thought you might be able to answer mine."

Detective Marrone smiled; Kirsten was momentarily stunned at how beautiful that one transformation made her. "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours," she said.

"I can't imagine I'll be much help," Kirsten said. "What did you want to know?"

The detective took out a pad and a pen. "Did your son tell you he was going out tonight?"

"Yes."

"Did he tell you where he was going?"

"No," Kirsten said. "But he's seventeen, and he's always been very responsible." She glanced at the hospital room door. "Until tonight," she added.

"Uh-huh. Did you know Summer Roberts, Mrs. Cohen?"

Kirsten immeadiately felt tears well in her eyes. Embarrassed, she swiped at the them with the back of her hands. "Yes," she said. "Sum is... was like a daughter to me."

"And what was she to your son?"

"His girlfriend." Kirsten was more confused now than before. Had Summer been involved in something illegal or dangerous? Was that why Seth had been driving through a bad neighborhood?

She did not realize that she'd spoken aloud until Detective Marrone's brows drew together. "A bad neighborhood?"

"Well," Kirsten said, coloring. "We know there was a gun involved."

The detective snapped shut her notebook and started for the door. "I'd like to talk to Seth now," she said.

"You can't," Kirsten insisted, blocking the other woman's way. "He's asleep. He needs his rest. Besides, he doesn't even know about Summer yet. We couldn't tell him, not like this. He loved her."

Detective Marrone stared at Kirsten. "Maybe," she said. "But he also may have shot her."

**Dun, Dun, Dun. Or not. You guys expected that I'm sure. Please review!**


	4. Chapter 4

**Just a little FYI. This is in the past. This story will jump from the future to the present every now and then but don't worry, hopefully it won't be too confusing.**

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**CHAPTER 4**

**THEN, Fall 1979**

From the way Maya hefted the small brick of banana bread in the palm of her hand, her husband was not sure if she was planning to eat it or to throw it. She closed the front door, still shiny with new paint, and carried the loaf to the cartons that were substuting as a makeshirt kitchen table. With reverent finger she touched the French-wre ribbon and untangled a card decorated with a hand-drawn house. "Welcome," she read, 'to the NEIGH-borhood."

"Your veterinary reputation has preceded you," she said, handing the card to Neil.

Neil scanned the brief message, smiled, and tore open the cellophane. "It's good," he said. "Try some?"

Maya paled. Even the thought of banana bread- of and food really before noon made her queasy these days. Which was odd because every book she'd read on the subject of pregnancy- and she'd read many- said that by now, her fourth month, she should be feeling better. "I'll call to thank them," she said, retrieving the card. "Oh. My." She glanced up at Neil. "Kirsten and Sandy. And they sent baked goods. Do you think they're...you know?"

"Gay?"

"I would have say 'embarking on an alternative lifestyle.'"

"But you didn't," Neil said, grinning. He lifted a box and started up the stairs.

"Well," Maya deplomatically announced, "Whatever their...orentation, I'm sure they're perfectly nice." But as she dialed, she was wondering again what kind of town they had moved to.

She had not wanted to come to Newport; she'd been perfectly happy in Boston, and even that was a stretch from her native Ohio. Maya had never been particually good at forging friendships, and couldn't Neil have found large animals to minister to somewhere farther south?

A man answered on the third ring. "Grand Central Station," the voice said, and Maya slammed down the phone. She redialed more carefully, and this time getting the same voice with a smile in it, crisply saing, "Cohens."

"Yes," Maya said. "I'm calling from next door. Maya Roberts. I wanted to thank the Cohens for the bread."

"Oh, great. You got it. Are you all moved in yet?"

There was silence while Maya wondered who this person was and protocol was in this part of the country; if one went about revealing one's whole life to a housekeeper or nanny. "Is Kirsten or Sandy there?" Maya asked quietly. "I, um, would like to introduce myself."

"I'm Sandy," the man said.

"But you're not a woman," Maya blurted.

Sandy Cohen laughed. "You mean you thought- Wow! Nope, sorry to disappoint, but last time I checked I was male. Sandy, as in Sanford. But no one's called me that since my grandmother died trying to. Hey, do you need a hand over there? My wife would love to come. She's got nothing to do. And quite frankly, she's driving me nuts." Before Maya could demur, Sandy made the decision for her. "Leave the door open," he said. "she'll be there in a few minutes."

Maya was still staring at the receiver when Neil came back into the kitchen, carrying a large carton of china. "Did you talk to Sandy Cohen?" he grunted. "What's she like?"

She had just opened her mouth to answer when the front door burst open, slamming back agaisnt its hinges on a gust of wind to reveal an extremly pregnant woman with a festival of wild hair and the incongruously sweet smile of a saint.

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"So," Neil said, accepting the gin and tonic that Sandy Cohen had mixed for him. "You're a public defender."

Sandy settled across from Neil in a wing chair. From the kitchen, he could hear Kirsten and Maya, their voices high and sweet as robins'. "That I am," Sandy said. "I'm finishing a case over at there." He took a sip of his own drink. "Kirsten tells me you took over Howath's practice?"

Neil nodded. "He was one of my professors at Tufts," he explained. "When he wrote to say he was retiring out here, I started thinking there might be room for another vet." He laughed.

The two men smiled uncomfortably and stared down at their glasses.

Neil glanced toward the women's voices. "They've hit it off," he said. "Kirsten is over so much, I sometimes think she's moved in."

Sandy laughed. "Kirsten needed someone like Maya. I have a feeling she gets more support complaining about stretch marks and swollen ankles to your wife than she gets from me."

Neil didn't say anything. Perhaps Sandy was ambivalent about pregnancy, but Neil wanted as many details as he could get. He had taken books out of Maya's bookcase showing a blastosphere reconfiguring into a tiny human. He had been the one to sign up for natural childbirth classes. And as ashamed as Maya was by her burgeoning body, he found it lovely. Pomengrante-ripe and lush, it was all he could do to refrain from laying hands on his wife whenever she breezed by him. But Maya undressed in the dark, pulled the covers to here chine, batted away his embrace. Neil had, from time to time, watched Kirsten move about his house-five months more pregnant and unwieldy, but with a confidence and a vigor that lit her from within, and he would think, _this is how maya should be_.

He looked toward the kitchen, caught a glimpse of Kirsten's swollen stomach preceding her. "Actually," Neil said slowly, "I kind of like this whole pregnancy think."

"Oh don't get me wrong." Sandy said. "I do too. Kirsten is amazing, and she's beautiful. But...she likes to complain a lot and I really don't know what to say to her."

"Ah," Kirsten said, suddenly there, putting her hand on Sandy's shoulder. "My husband is downright terrified of childbirth," she teased, speaking to Neil. "Would you like to delivier my baby?"

"Sure," Neil said. "But I'm most comfortable operating in a barn."

Kirsten took a cheese tray from Maya's hands and set it down on the coffee table. "I'm flexible," she said.

Neil watched Kirsten settle on the arm of her husband's chair. Sandy made no move to touch her. He leaned around her toward the cheese tray. "Is the pate?" he asked.

Kirste nodded. "Homemade," she explained.

"I see," Neil said.  
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"Sandy is being an idiot," Kirsten said when Maya called. "He told me if I don't stop walking down the road I'm going to be having the baby under a telephone pole."

"I would think you'd have more time than that."

"Try telling him."

"Use a different tactic," Maya said. "Tell him the better shape you're in before the baby is born, the easier it will be to get your old body back."

"Who said I want my old body back?" Kirsten asked. "Can't I pick someone else's? Farrah Fawcett...Christie Blinkley..." She sighed. "You don't know how luck you are."

"Because I'm only five months pregnant?"

"Because you're married to Neil."

Maya didn't answer for a moment. She liked Sandy Cohen, with his cool looks, and effortless charm, the thread of a New York accent in his speech. Many of the characteristics that Maya possessed Sandy possessed also, but with a positive twist: She was reserved, he was level-headed; she was shy, he was introspective; she was obsessive, he was exacting.

He was also right. Kirsten's water broke three days later, half a mile down the road, and if a passing telephone company vehicle hadn't stopped to ask if she was all right, she might very well have delivered Seth on the edge of a street.  
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The dream went like this: Maya could see Neil's back as he crouched in a stall, his silver hair glinting with the early sun light, his hands moving over the heavy belly of a mare that was trying to foal. And she was standing overhead somewhere- in a hayloft, maybe?- water dripping down her legs as if she'd wet herself, yelling for him although no sound came out of her mouth.

That was how she knew she was going to have her baby alone.

"I'll call every hour on the hour," Neil assured her. But Maya knew how Neil functioned: Once he got wrapped up in a colicky horse or a ewe with mastitis, time fell away from him; most of the roads he traveled as a country vet didn't have a luxurious string of telephone booths.

Her due date came and went at the end of April. Then one night, Maya heard Neil answer the phone beside the bed. He whispered something her mind did not register, and disappeared in the dark.

She dreamed again about the barn, and woke up to find the mattress soaking wet.

Pain made her double over, Neil must have left a note somewhere with a telephone number. Maya walked through the bedroom and the bathroom, periodically stopping to sweat out contractions, but she couldn't find it. She picked up the phone and called Kirsten.

"Now," She said, and Kirsten understood.

Sandy was working late again that night, so Kirsten brought Seth along in his car seat. "We'll find Neil," she assured Neil. She placed Maya's hand on the gearshirt, telling her to squeeze when it started to hurt. At the Emergency pavilion, she parked the car. "Stay here," she said, grabbing Seth and running through sliding doors. "You have to help me," she shouted to a triage nurse. "There's a woman in labor."

The nurse blinked at her, at Seth. "Looks to me like you're too late," she said.

"It's not me," Kirsten said. "It's my friend. In the car."

Within minutes Maya was in a delivery room, wearing a fresh johnny and writhing in pain. The obstetrics nurse turned to Kirsten. "I don't suppose you know where the father is?"

"On his way," Kirsten said, though this was not ture. "I'm supposed to stand in for him."

The nursed looked at Maya, who had reached out to hold Kirsten's hand, and at Seth, who was asleep in a plastic bassinet. "I'll take him to the nursery," she said. "Can't have a baby in delivery."

"I thought that was the point," Kirsten muttered, and Maya choked out a laugh.

"You didn't tell me this hurt," Maya said.

"Of course I did."

"You didn't tell me," she amended, "it hurt this much."

Maya's doctor had also delivered Seth. "Let me guess," she said to Kirsten, reaching beneath the johnny to check Maya's cervix. "You had so much fun the first time you couldn't stay away." She helped Maya sit up. "Okay, Maya," the doctor said. "I want you to push."

So with her best friend bracing her shoulders and shouting in strident harmony, Maya gave birth to a girl. "Oh, my," she said, her eyes damp.

"Oh, look at that."

"I know," Kirsten said, her throat tight. "I see." And she left to find her own child.

The nurse had just finished packing ice between Maya's legs and drawing the covers up to her waist when Kirsten returned to the room with Seth in her arms. "Look who I ran into," she said, holding the door so that Neil could pass through.

"I told you so," Maya chided, but she was already turning the baby so Neil could see her.

Neil touched his daughter's fine blond eyebrows. His fingernail was larger than her nose. "She's perfect. She's..." He shook his head and looked up. "I don't know what to say."

"You owe me," Kirsten suggested.

"I do," Neil said, smiling from the inside. "I'll give you anything but my firstborn."

The door of the room swung open again, and Sandy Cohen stood there in his business suit, holding aloft a bottle of champagne. "Hey!" he said, pumping Neil's hand. "Rumor has it that you've had quite a morning." He smiled at Kirsten. "And I hear you're a midwife." He popped open the Moet, apologizing as some fizzed onto Maya's blankets, and poured the champagne into four plastic cups. "To parenthood," he said, lifting his glass. "To...does she have a name?"

Neil looked at his wife. "Summer," she said.

"To Summer."

Neil lifted his glass. "And, belatedly, to Seth."

Maya glanced at the baby's translucent eyelids and slack bow mouth, and reluctantly transferred her to the plastic bassinet beside the bed. Summer barely took up a third of the space.

"Do you mind?" Kirsten asked softly, pointing to the bassinet and then to Seth, snoring softly in her arms.

"Go right ahead." Maya watched Kirsten lay her son beside Summer.

"Look at that," Neil said. "My daughter's an hour old and she's already sleeping with another guy."

The all looked at the bassinet. The baby startled, a relfex. Her long finger flailed open like a morning glory and curled back into fists, grabbing for purchase. And although she was completly unaware, when Summer Roberts again settled into sleep, she was holding tight to Seth Cohen's hand.

**AND...now's the time to review. **


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